Bad things happen as we know, to people who, even if they are not always good, don’t deserve such things to happen to them. I’m speaking about the mob mentality that grips individuals from time to time resulting in violent incidents affecting individuals who are quietly going about their business. Often festivals like Holi become an occasion, not for celebrating spring and good cheer, but for ransacking public places and roughing up ordinary folk. On the day after Holi, I read a report in the papers, for example, about a gang of drunken revellers who forced their way into a hotel in Chembur and beat up the owner, Ram Lakhan Yadav as well as one of his daughters who happened to be on the premises.
Sure, mob fury vents itself on ordinary days as well. The other day I read about a bunch of students who gheraoed the dean of a college in Mumbai who they thought had molested a student, proceeded to blacken his face and drag him round the premises of the college, only to discover later on that they had got hold of the wrong person. In Pune, workers from the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena mobbed a poor hawker from U.P. and in an act of grotesque violence against “intruders from the north”, chopped off the poor fellow’s hands.
Because of the dramatic and violent nature of some of these acts, we tend to associate mob mentality with packs of mad marauders. But it seems to me that in a more subtle manner most of us social beings are subject to the kind of illogical and counter productive thinking which underlies mob thinking, though it goes by another name. Let’s call it “mindless conformism”. Intelligent women – wives and mothers – resentfully bow down to their husbands’ or in-laws’ rules and regulations because not to do so would attract the disapproval, if not fury of the circle of relatives in which they happen to live and which they are ill equipped to deal with. The aunts, uncles and cousins in question might not blacken your face or chop off your limbs for failing to toe the line but they are sure as hell capable of making life miserable for you. As a result so many of the women I know are afraid (yes even in today’s supposedly modern times and in what you might think were progressive circles) to lead their own lives and to prosper as individuals even though they have the means to do so.
Several of the individuals who come to me for counselling and therapy, too, suffer interminably as a result of their hankering for all that they cannot have and for positions they were not meant to occupy – simply because that is what they are supposed to want and which they think will elevate them in the eyes of the crowd. Rather than examine their own gifts and cash in on their innate abilities they spend years dragging themselves through jobs they hate while craving to be recognised for what they are not. Most of them are genuinely wonderful individuals, yet fail to recognise their worth. What can one say! So much is determined by convention, by outdated values unthinkingly supported by the majority. How else can one account for the crazy desire among the young in today’s world, To Be Somebody – never mind what. The president of a flourishing company, a famous rock star, a much sought after doctor, engineer or architect - regardless of whether the individual concerned possesses the talent necessary to excel in the field, or not.
As Anthony D’Mello puts it in “The Way Of Love”, we are addicted to approval the way addicts are addicted to cocaine or heroin. When we don’t get our daily fix of admiration or our daily pat on the back, we wilt. Is it “human nature” or is it that we were brought up to need those things in order to feel good about ourselves?
People imagine that perfection means reaching the top of the ladder in your chosen field and having your name and face plastered in the press and on posters around town. I prefer J. Krishnamurti’s view of the word. “You may excel, you may be very very good at whatever you do,” he says, “but I am talking of mediocrity of the mind, of the heart, of your entire being.” Which means you might have made it as president of some monstrous multinational firm, or as a surgeon or anything else and still remain mediocre as a human being. You would have succeeded in obeying social convention and in becoming a “good boy or girl” but not in fulfilling your own unique nature.
Breaking out of the conventional mode doesn’t mean going berserk or damaging the environment or other human beings. It means establishing a different kind of order in your life, one that emerges from your own intelligence which is to say from out of a natural wisdom which is sadly lacking in our world. In an environment where order comes not from coercion but because it honestly makes sense, and where rules are followed, not out of fear but rather out of choice, there will be little incentive for people to go on a rampage to let out their frustrations at the slightest opportunity, which is essentially what mob activity is about.
Uma
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